Right now, many hospitals have an onslaught of digital data coming in, but they're still not sure how to turn those numbers into action, said CEO Steven Mason of onFocus.

His company's product is coming in high demand now, thanks to health care reform, he says. This week, onFocus announced that it had expanded its customer base for the software by more than 50 percent, adding 152 new hospitals to the mix.

Mason spoke with Tennesseanreporter Shelley DuBois about moving performance goals out of spreadsheets and how his company plans to make its product even smarter.

What goals can you help hospitals meet?

If you look at all the hospitals we work with, for the most part, they're focused on the same things: quality, patient satisfaction, financial performance and safety.

They start every year with a strategic plan that has all their goals. For example, "By X date, we're going to achieve Y amount of growth or volume." Then they look at all these plans and put them on spreadsheets.

Is that where the act of meeting those goals breaks down?

It's the only thing that's not automated in that whole performance management landscape. So we step into that by offering them an automated performance management software that basically takes all of their plans, their people, their metrics, their progress tracking and brings it into an online system.

When you start working with a provider, do you have to go out and get all kinds of new data?

Hospitals, for the most part, have everything they need to use our system. But then a lot of them hire consulting firms who come in and create these very elaborate plans, but then they don't help them with the execution part.

We're the execution side of the house. We're the action people. We organize and attach people to metrics and goals, then we go back and close the loop and ask whether they did what they were assigned to do.

Hospitals' challenges change constantly. How do you think your software will evolve?

One of the things we're doing right now is making it smart. We have a new version that will be released to our customers in January that has what we call "action plan libraries." We're mining our expertise, our clients' expertise and the expertise of some specialized consulting companies and basically building a smart plan. For example, if you're a medium-sized rural hospital looking for financial solutions, the system will suggest 10 possible next-level goals. Then it will suggest 5 to 10 actions to achieve those goals.

Some CEOs steer away from this question, but has health care reform affected the demand for onFocus software?

Absolutely. This is a reform-era solution. Here's the mandate for providers — you've got to see more patients for less money with higher-quality outcomes than you have had before. You need new management tools — you can't just keep throwing bodies at it in order to make the leap. You do need people; you just want them focused on productive activities.